Welcome: Copilot at work, the ADAPT way

In this lesson you'll

• Explain the difference between Copilot Chat and the licensed Copilot experience, and find out which one you have.
• Use ADAPT to plan how you will use Copilot on a real task.
• Write a six-part brief for a Copilot task and compare it with a one-line request.
• Start the practice log you will use for the rest of the course.

Welcome

Microsoft Copilot at Work is a specialist course from the Enterprise Technology Association (ETA). Finish it, including the capstone and final assessment, and you earn the ETA Specialist credential: ETA Specialist: Microsoft Copilot. It is a focused, tool-specific credential that sits alongside the ETA Certified AI Empowered Professional; it is not a level of the certification.

The course builds on Level 1: Foundations of the ETA Certified AI Empowered Professional. You will reuse its vocabulary: ADAPT, the six-part brief, and the ETA Agent Autonomy Ladder. If you have not taken Foundations yet, take it first, or at least read its lessons on ADAPT and briefing.

ETA's goal for you is simple: reliable, safe, measurable value from Copilot in the apps you already use every day. Not more AI for its own sake. Fewer hours lost to inbox archaeology, meeting catch-up and first drafts, with checks strong enough that you can stand behind what you send.

Two ways your organization may give you Copilot

Microsoft offers Copilot to organizations in more than one form, and what you can do depends on which one you have. This course uses two plain terms:

Every hands-on exercise in this course works at all three levels. When an exercise needs licensed Copilot, a fallback tells you how to do the same practice with Copilot Chat or another approved assistant using pasted, non-sensitive text.

Names and menus change: check your own tenant

Microsoft renames Copilot products, features and license plans often, and rolls features out to different organizations at different times. Your organization's administrators also turn features on or off. Your tenant is your organization's own Microsoft 365 environment, with its own settings.

So this course teaches what to ask Copilot for and how to check the result, not which button to press. When it describes a capability ("ask Copilot to summarize a meeting from its transcript"), look for it in your own apps, and if you cannot find it, ask your IT team or Copilot champion whether it is turned on for you. Dated details, such as current product names and what each license includes, live in one place: the Rules and tools snapshot (November 2026) lesson at the end of this module.

Quick check: which do you have? Open Copilot in Outlook, Teams or the Microsoft 365 app and ask: "Summarize the three most recent emails I received from my manager." If Copilot can answer from your actual mailbox, you probably have licensed Copilot features there. If it asks you to paste the emails or answers only in general terms, you probably have Copilot Chat. Then confirm with IT, because some apps behave differently from others.

ADAPT for Copilot

ADAPT is ETA's AI Fluency Framework: five capabilities of a fluent AI user. They mean exactly what they meant in Foundations.

Here is what each one looks like with Copilot:

Copilot makes Direct easier in one way: it can often find context for you, so you do not have to paste everything. It makes Assure and Protect more important in another: it can pull in content you forgot existed, including old versions and things that were shared more widely than they should have been.

The six-part brief, applied to Copilot

A brief is a prompt that gives the AI the context it needs, not just the request. Foundations taught six parts: goal, context, audience, constraints, format and done criteria. With Copilot, "context" often means pointing to sources rather than pasting them.

Weak vs. strong: a county public works office

A project coordinator needs to update her director on a road resurfacing project.

Weak

Summarize the road project emails.

Strong

Goal: Give my director a status update on the Elm Street resurfacing project
so she can decide whether to approve the revised schedule on Friday.
Context: Use emails and Teams messages from the last 3 weeks that mention
"Elm Street" or the contractor, plus the latest revised schedule file.
Ignore anything about other projects.
Audience: The public works director. She knows the project well and wants
the decision first.
Constraints: Use only facts from those sources. If sources disagree on a
date or cost, show both and say which is newer. Do not guess.
Format: 1 sentence on the decision needed, then 5 bullets (schedule, cost,
open risks, who is waiting on whom, next step), under 200 words.
Done criteria: Every date and dollar figure has a reference I can open.
Anything uncertain is marked [CHECK].

The strong brief takes about 90 seconds to write. It tells Copilot which sources to search, what to ignore, and how to handle conflicts. It also sets up Assure: the done criteria tell you exactly what to check before forwarding.

You will not write all six parts for every quick request. A good habit is to always include the goal, the sources (as context) and the done criteria, and add the rest when the output matters.

How this course is organized

1. How Copilot works at work: grounding, permissions, oversharing, data protection and the dated snapshot.
2. Daily communication: Outlook and Teams, including verifying meeting recaps.
3. Documents, data and decks: Word, Excel and PowerPoint, with checks for sources and numbers.
4. Agents, reusable prompts and measuring value: saved prompts, Copilot agents on the Autonomy Ladder, a team playbook, and honest measurement.

You finish with a capstone: a Copilot playbook for one real recurring workflow on your team, reviewed by an ETA reviewer.

Try it

Start your Copilot practice log. Copy this template into a document you control (a personal OneNote page or Word file is fine). You will add to it in most lessons, and it feeds your capstone.

COPILOT PRACTICE LOG
My access: [licensed Copilot / Copilot Chat / other approved assistant]
Confirmed with: [IT, champion, or "not yet"]

| Date | Task | App | Brief used (short) | Minutes without AI (est.) | Minutes with AI incl. checking | Errors I caught | Keep? |
|------|------|-----|--------------------|---------------------------|-------------------------------|-----------------|-------|

Then run your first comparison:

1. Pick a real, low-stakes task you do this week: a status update, a short summary of a thread, or a reply.
2. Ask Copilot with a one-line request. Save the result.
3. Ask again with a six-part brief based on the public works example. Point to specific sources if you have licensed Copilot.
4. Compare: which version needed fewer edits? Which was easier to check? Log both.

Copilot Chat or no Copilot: do the same in Copilot Chat or your approved assistant, pasting a short, non-sensitive text (an old newsletter, a public web page, or notes with names and numbers removed) as your source.

Key takeaways

• This course earns the ETA Specialist credential: ETA Specialist: Microsoft Copilot. It builds on Level 1: Foundations.
• Licensed Copilot can work from content you already have access to; Copilot Chat mainly works from the web and what you give it. Find out which you have.
• Names, menus and features change and vary by tenant. Learn the capability, then find it in your own apps.
• Use ADAPT, and brief Copilot with at least a goal, sources and done criteria; add all six parts when the output matters.